Advanced Morphology (Master S3 Class)

Basic information

• Credits: 3
• Format: 2.5 hours weekly
• 2026-2027 instructors: Olivier Bonami
• 2026-2027 schedule: 10:00-12:30, room 147
• Moodle page

Description

Linguistic morphology studies the internal structure of words and the way words relate to one another in form and meaning.

In the last 10 years, theoretical thinking on morphology has shifted away from an exclusive focus on formal analyses accounting for categorical properties of morphological systems, to attempts to model gradient aspects of these systems using quantitative tools. This shift was influenced by taking into account important empirical results from corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

This class will acquaint students with contemporary literature on morphology taking a quantitative perspective, adopting a multidisciplinary perspective, and put students in the position of making contributions to that literature.

Prerequisites

General knowledge of morphology as an empirical domain is required, as provided e.g. by the S1 class “Morphology”.

Given the multidisciplinary nature of the content, there is no other prerequisite, but acquaintance with any of the following areas will be helpful:

1. Formal approaches to morphology (see the S2 “Theoretical morphology” class).
2. Psycholinguistics and/or experimental linguistics.
3. Quantitative corpus linguistics.
4. Computational linguistics and/or machine learning.

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Read and criticize contemporary literature on morphology in theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.
• Contribute to original research in the domain of morphology.